How this Philly Game Forge studio got its game on the front page of Sony’s PS4 network

Nearly four years after Sony first approached Final Form Games, the studio has just launched its “neoclassical” shooter, Jamestown+, for PlayStation4. It’s the second indie game built in Philly to make it to the platform.

March 18th, 2015 | Technical.ly Philly by Juliana Reyes

The story starts at the 2011 Penny Arcade Expo.

At PAX, as it’s known, the Philly team behind Final Form Games — brothers Mike Ambrogi Primo and Tim Ambrogi Saxon and developer Halsted Larsson (who recently left the company) — spent three days in Seattle showing off their PC game Jamestown, a multiplayer “neoclassical cooperative shoot-em-up” set on 17th-century British colonial Mars, at the biggest video game expo in North America.

The booth was completely free, their prize for being chosen as one of the “PAX10,” an indie game honor. That’s where they met Nick Suttner, a Sony account manager and the company’s unofficial indie game evangelist. Suttner was interested in Jamestown.

Back then, Sony had just started reaching out to indie game developers. Developer kits, industrial-strength PlayStations that you can plug into your computer and run live code on, were costly and barricaded by tough security measures. Suttner was excited enough about Jamestown that he got Final Form Games a PlayStation3 developer kit, but the team eventually decided it wasn’t the right time to pursue a PlayStation remake and shelved the project.